"Farewell for ever," she had cried, yet had hoped, perhaps, to see him return to her to-morrow, like some small country squire, who thinks all England will be outraged if he marry beneath his rural importance, yet yields to an irresistible love for the miller's daughter or the village barmaid.
"I have lived through too many fevers to die of this one," Kilrush thought, and braced his nerves to go on living, though all the colour seemed washed out of his life.
While his heart was being lacerated by anger and regret, he was surprised by the appearance of his cousin, the ci-devant captain of Dragoons, of whose existence he had taken no account since his afternoon visit to Clapham. He was in his library, a large room at the back of the house, looking into a small garden shadowed by an old brick wall, and overlooked by the back windows of Pall Mall, which looked down into it as into a green well. The room was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and the favourite calf binding of those days made a monotone of sombre brown, suggestive of gloom, even on a summer day, when the scent of stocks and mignonette was blown in through the open windows.
Kilrush received his kinsman with cold civility.
Not even in the splendour of his court uniform had George Stobart looked handsomer than to-day in his severely cut grey cloth coat and black silk waistcoat. There was a light in his eyes, a buoyant youthfulness in his aspect, which Kilrush observed with a pang of envy. Ah, had he been as young, Fate and Antonia might have been kinder.
George put down his hat, and took the chair his cousin indicated, chilled somewhat by so distant a greeting.
"I saw in Lloyd's Evening Post that your lordship intended starting for the Continent," he began, "and I thought it my duty to wait upon you before you left town."
"You are very good—and Lloyd is very impertinent—to take so much trouble about my movements. Yes, George, I am leaving England."
"Do you go far, sir?"
"Paris will be the first stage of my journey."